Author: Juan Carlos Vidal, eLearning Resource Manager
Templates allow organizations to produce courses in a small fraction of the time it would take to do traditionally. According to our experience on more than 1600 courses developed with SHIFT, using SHIFT's templates saves at least 50% on labor costs and up to 75% on development schedules, consistently.
There are several misconceptions around using templates. Top on the list is that templates reduce creativity: quite the opposite I think: having access a very large library of templates gives the Instructional Designer the tremendous flexibility of being able to choose from a very diverse, best-of-breed set of preconfigured interactions. It also gives our designers access to previously complex or too-expensive to develop interactions.
Templates actually increase flexibility, they're easy to update, and they provide consistency across the enterprise. They can also reduce costs, training time, and reduce variability due to programming bugs.
Templates allow our organization to:
Incorporate best practices and effectiveness to the learning process: each new template goes through several effectiveness and usability tests before they're released to the production process. Its designing process incorporates best practices in usability from the ground up.
Reduce error by exhaustive technical tests: before a template is released to the production process, it goes through several tests in different platforms and conditions in order to eliminate programming bugs.
Be dynamic, by constant improvement and updates: templates can be improved regularly to meet technological and instructional requirements as well as the client's needs. These are easily tracked and updated.
Templates mean results for our organization: dramatically reduce costs, time to market and most significantly, give the Instructional Designer more power, more choices, and much more independence.
Templates allow organizations to produce courses in a small fraction of the time it would take to do traditionally. According to our experience on more than 1600 courses developed with SHIFT, using SHIFT's templates saves at least 50% on labor costs and up to 75% on development schedules, consistently.
There are several misconceptions around using templates. Top on the list is that templates reduce creativity: quite the opposite I think: having access a very large library of templates gives the Instructional Designer the tremendous flexibility of being able to choose from a very diverse, best-of-breed set of preconfigured interactions. It also gives our designers access to previously complex or too-expensive to develop interactions.
Templates actually increase flexibility, they're easy to update, and they provide consistency across the enterprise. They can also reduce costs, training time, and reduce variability due to programming bugs.
Templates allow our organization to:
Incorporate best practices and effectiveness to the learning process: each new template goes through several effectiveness and usability tests before they're released to the production process. Its designing process incorporates best practices in usability from the ground up.
Reduce error by exhaustive technical tests: before a template is released to the production process, it goes through several tests in different platforms and conditions in order to eliminate programming bugs.
Be dynamic, by constant improvement and updates: templates can be improved regularly to meet technological and instructional requirements as well as the client's needs. These are easily tracked and updated.
Templates mean results for our organization: dramatically reduce costs, time to market and most significantly, give the Instructional Designer more power, more choices, and much more independence.
